Overview of BioASQ 2023: The eleventh BioASQ challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering

TL;DR

The BioASQ 2023 challenge showcased ongoing progress in biomedical semantic indexing and question answering through diverse tasks and competitive system submissions, advancing the state-of-the-art in biomedical NLP.

Contribution

This overview introduces new tasks and reports on extensive system submissions, highlighting advancements in biomedical semantic indexing and clinical content annotation.

Findings

Most systems achieved competitive performance

Introduction of a new clinical annotation task in Spanish

Continued progress in biomedical NLP capabilities

Abstract

This is an overview of the eleventh edition of the BioASQ challenge in the context of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2023. BioASQ is a series of international challenges promoting advances in large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering. This year, BioASQ consisted of new editions of the two established tasks b and Synergy, and a new task (MedProcNER) on semantic annotation of clinical content in Spanish with medical procedures, which have a critical role in medical practice. In this edition of BioASQ, 28 competing teams submitted the results of more than 150 distinct systems in total for the three different shared tasks of the challenge. Similarly to previous editions, most of the participating systems achieved competitive performance, suggesting the continuous advancement of the state-of-the-art in the field.